Nothing Really Changed on That Ballfield Yesterday

OK, it's been a day now, so I feel comfortable with what I am going to write.

I feel comfortable with what I am going to write because, in 2011, six people were shot to death in Arizona and a member of Congress named Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded. In the immediate aftermath, a Republican Congressman named Mike Pence told Dave Weigel, then of Slate, the following:

"I maintain, as Americans have believed since the American founding, that firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens make communities safer, not less safe," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., a potential presidential candidate, of the magazine-ban legislation. When it was pointed out that citizens aren't allowed to own, say, machine guns, he criticized the attitude of a city where this could even be asked. "I think, particularly in Washington, D.C., the desire is to move immediately off and find something else to blame, and find some public policy that's wanting. I think what we had here was a despicable human being."

I also feel comfortable with what I am going to write because, in 2012, 26 people, including 20 very young students, were shot to death at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the immediate aftermath, a Republican congressman named Steve Scalise said the following (h/t The Rude Pundit):

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"I think they counted over 40 different laws that were broken by the Sandy Hook murderer. Then somebody is going to tell you that one more law, which makes it harder for law-abiding citizens to get a gun, would have stopped him from doing that."

Regarding the same event, Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association, said the following:

"But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word? A gun in the hands of a secret service agent protecting our president isn't a bad word… We can't lose precious time debating legislation that won't work. I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed officers in every single school in this nation."

I also feel comfortable with what I am going to write because I know that the near-fatal wounding of a member of Congress in the middle of a daylight massacre and the slaughter of schoolchildren wasn't enough—that, in fact, the manufacturers of lethal weapons used each of these events as a perverse marketing tool with LaPierre as the chief salesman and members of Congress as their frontmen. I also feel comfortable with what I am going to write because, in 2014, three years after Tuscon and two after Sandy Hook, while on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, waved a flintlock musket over his head, willing to look like an idiot rather than be mistaken for anyone who for a moment thought that there are too many firearms in too many hands for one country to feel comfortable.

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That was how the most influential members of our political elite chose to memorialize six people in Arizona and 26 people in Connecticut: by making sure people could buy more weapons. According to The New York Times, that peculiar memorial to the slain continues right up to the present moment.

"Had there not been a member of House leadership present, there would have been no police present, and it would have become the largest act of political terrorism in years, if not ever," Representative Tom Garrett of Virginia said, pointing to legislation he has introduced to make it easier for people to carry a gun in Washington. That bill "would allow the most law-abiding among us to defend themselves," he said.

A day has passed, and that's pretty much as long as it took before we started talking about anything but crazy people and guns, so I feel comfortable in writing that the reaction within our politics and within our political media to the events in Alexandria on Wednesday will prove more dangerous to the republic in the long run than the shooting itself. It also became fairly nauseating. We heard how Democratic and Republican senators were hugging each other. Each congressional tear was counted and catalogued. I mean, holy mother of god, three people were actually killed at a UPS center in San Francisco later on Wednesday morning, but that story got whisked into the dustbin in favor of existential mooing from the halls of Congress, as though the proliferations of instruments of mass killing is not existential threat enough.

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There are too many firearms in too many hands for one country to feel comfortable.

My man Chuck Todd was sadly typical of the form, deploring a "tinderbox of constantly escalating rhetoric" and being terribly distressed by "toxic stew that passes for political discourse…for too long our collective politics have demonized the other side for caustic behavior while rationalizing that same behavior when it comes from someone who shares their politics."

In this, my man Chuck Todd is being a dangerous child who somehow slept through the past 25 years. How did things get so "caustic"? Well, who was it that mainstreamed Rush Limbaugh, and all the little mini-Limbaughs who still haunt the radio dials all across the country? Who was it that bought and sold the Purple Heart Band-Aids that mocked John Kerry's service? Who cheered on the Swift Boat liars? Who were the people who accused the Clintons of murder and drug-running? Who were the Birthers? We certainly know who the Birther-in-Chief was. He was the guy who also called upon "Second Amendment people" to confront Hillary Rodham Clinton, and what price has he paid for his lies and slander? He's the damn President* of the United States.

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Who was it that brought automatic weapons, out in the open, to rallies held by the previous President of the United States? As it happens, one of the latter incidents happened in Tucson, where Gabby Giffords got shot, and the reaction to it was a combination of lethal weapons and radio talk, via HuffPost:

"Oh, it's not a game," Chris interjected.

"—-with what I imagine is a loaded weapon," Sanchez continued.

"We know what we're up against," Hancock continued. "We're up against a tyrannical government that will rob the next generation as long as they can get away with it."

Come to think of it, who was it that sold all those T-shirts about "watering the tree of liberty," and who was it that led the cheers for armed sedition at the Bundy Ranch and at the bird sanctuary in Oregon?

Whose team was it that tweeted out the following, almost a year ago?

.@Judgenap: Why do we have a Second Amendment? It's not to shoot deer. It's to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!

Why, that was the staff of Senator Rand Paul, a former presidential candidate and someone who might have been wounded himself on Wednesday had the Capitol Police not stepped in when they did.

Are there destructive people on the left? Of course there are. But this kind of politics and this kind of rhetoric has been part and parcel of the conservative Republican mainstream for decades now. (It was telling that the sound clip Todd used came from Newt Gingrich, because a lot of that original mainstreaming is his responsibility.) The Democratic Party doesn't elect one of those black-masked idiots to Congress. But the Republican Party is more than happy to send this guy. From USA Today:

"Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter," Higgins, the Louisiana Republican and freshman congressman, posted Saturday after an attack on unarmed people in London. "Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identity them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all."

As far as I know, nothing's happened to ol' Clay. He's going to get re-elected for the next 20 years if he so desires.

In truth, "caustic political rhetoric" has a longer history in American politics than the Constitution does. (Colonial pamphleteers were the original scurvy blogging class.) John Adams was not really a hermaphrodite, no matter what Thomas Jefferson's pet newspapers said. However, the pious nonsense about The Tone that hit high tide on Wednesday afternoon does indeed serve political purposes as well. (Let us now praise famous frauds.) First, as we've seen, it is useful in the continuing political effort to render guns irrelevant to outbreaks of gun violence. Second, it was instantly employed to delegitimize genuine public outrage at the policies of this White House and this Congress.

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You may have noticed that, ever since the Inauguration, and ever since the Republican Congress has rolled out its healthcare plan, the local town halls conducted by members of Congress have gotten a little feisty, much in the fashion of what happened to Democratic congresscritters in 2009 and 2010. This has caused many Republican legislators to stop having town hall meetings at all. It didn't take three hours on Wednesday for these same folks to fold elderly ladies with DISAGREE placards into the bloody deeds of James Hodgkinson. From The Hill:

"We've got to do a little bit better planning. Immediately it brings town halls to mind too," Brat told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "You've got 1,000 folks, people that want to give you their views as constituents, etc., but the security thing now is going to be ramped up to a new level. If it takes just one person that's just off the rails on a certain day, it's just not good."

Back in May, this same Dave Brat, the Tea Party fave rave who relieved the Congress of the presence of Eric Cantor, hosted a fairly energetic town hall back in his Virginia home district. From The Washington Post:

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Trouble began even before Pastor Stan Grant of Clover Hill Assembly of God finished his invocation. As he prayed to God that the discussion would go forth "in a way that will honor you," a handful of Brat's critics stood holding small signs aloft. "Nope," "Shame" and "Stop using the Bible as a weapon," they read.

If discussing the relevance of guns to gun crimes is an unacceptable "politicization" of Wednesday's events, then surely talk of "ramping up" security at town hall meetings—which, in my experience, already feature heavy local police presence and, often, pre-screened audiences—is as well.

No, Chuck, caustic political rhetoric isn't going anywhere, despite the ensemble effort to pin the crimes of James Hodgkinson on it. In the first place, there are too damn many people making too much damn money—including one entire cable news outfit, the one that had Sean Hannity broadcasting from the scene of the crime Wednesday night and blaming Kathy Griffin and a production of Julius Caesar. I don't think he should be allowed out in public.

Caustic political rhetoric isn't going anywhere, despite the ensemble effort to pin the crimes of James Hodgkinson on it.

Besides, here are a few things that did not change on Wednesday.

The president* of the United States is still an incompetent buffoon, likely more than half-crooked, and a vulgar talking yam.

Paul Ryan is still the biggest fake in American politics, interested only in how much of the nation's wealth he can shove upwards to the people who buy him his $300 bottles of wine, and a zombie-eyed granny starver.

The Republican plan for healthcare is still simply a front for giving the party's donor class a massive tax cut. It will still throw 23 million people off their healthcare. It will still decimate Medicaid and take a substantial whack at Medicare as well. It will still make worse the lives of people whose lives are hard enough already. It is still worthy of the noisy contempt people demonstrated at the town halls that so unnerved Dave Brat. Now, it is being negotiated almost entirely under the table so as to allow Mitch McConnell, the old musket-brandisher, to ram it through without substantial examination or debate. That also is worthy of noisy contempt and, yes, of political rhetoric as caustic as the proposal is vicious.

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Surely, everyone is saddened by what happened at Simpson Field on Wednesday, just as we all should be saddened by what happened in San Francisco a few hours later, just as we all were saddened by the events in Connecticut almost five years ago, or Orlando last year. It would be nice to believe that the events there would produce a new era of comity in our society but, if Sandy Hook wasn't enough, Simpson Field is not likely to be, either. Until there's no profit in hatred, until civility proves to be a ratings juggernaut, nothing will change. Until the instruments of mass killing are regulated as stringently as we regulate automobiles, nothing will change. Until we have as serious a conversation about the actual misuse of the Second Amendment as we are currently having about the alleged misuse of the First, nothing will change.

Civility means more than cooling down what we say to each other. It also means treating our fellow citizens with dignity and respect in the policies through which we govern ourselves. The everyday violence of poverty is no less destructive to our national character than are our now-predictable mass shootings, over 150 of them this year. Until then, all the emotional distress that echoed through the halls of the Capitol on Wednesday is as empty and hollow in history as it was after Gabby Giffords was shot, or as it was after Adam Lanza showed up to the school that day. In fact, to quote a T-shirt that was all the rage back in 2016, and which, as far as I know, not a single Republican or conservative ever has disavowed…

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect that the Gabby Giffords shooting occurred in Tucson, not Phoenix, and that Senator Rand Paul's staff was responsible for the tweet above, not Paul himself.

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